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Comment

The thing is I have lots of products that I close out. And there are loads from the past as well that people may have links to. I'd be doing lots of 301 redirects!

Is there an easier (less time consuming) way to deal with this issue?

No.

Unfortunately on-site SEO is a pretty taxing area - We have a member of our team reviewing search console daily for each of our sites, this then gets passed to me to manage .htaccess.

Consider looking at Screaming Frog SEO spider. You can generate a report of the type of traffic (direct/organic/paid etc), work out the URL's, then build a spreadsheet to tear these down and build 301's for you.

Feel free to ping me an e-mail - dev3*smrbathrooms.co.uk

Replace the * with the @

And I'll send you a spreadsheet to use for your 301 management. Simply copy the output in to your .htaccess and keep adding more.

Comment

I just noticed that my old http site had lots of 404 errors listed that I never knew about.. but it didn't seem to affect my rankings which have remained very high for my keywords.

I will redirect them to the section that they resided in, if that section doesn't exist, I'd redirect to the level above that - ultimately terminating at the index url.

Always aim to give the customer the best experience available - You could even redirect to a page with a JS query string, query this using onload jquery and print a bar at top of screen informing the customer that the product is no longer available (bit excessive but ultimately would aid the customer)